Featured Directors

Featured quote (not written by me)

Cultural critic James Wolcott, on the new film critic:

"Film critics today have become these rabid completists... They feel like that with festivals, they have to see everything, no matter how minor. Part of it is bragging rights. The other part is that the only thing that feeds into their movie writing is other movies."

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Before you click away from the site in frustration, muttering to yourself, “what are all these obnoxiously vague categories that mean absolutely nothing to me,” give me a chance to explain.

ARegrettable Moment of Sincerity, is primarily a film criticism site, basically everything film related I’ve written anywhere on the internet, along with my more recent material that appeared in newspapers and magazines. The advantage of them being online is that you will also be able to read the director’s cut of each piece, which didn’t have to be trimmed for length or content. That doesn’t mean everything that you will read was initially intended for professional publications, since I have a habit of writing essay-length posts on forums. Seeing as they were meant for discussion, I would tweak them to sound like an open ended question. Now that they are standalone pieces, while I encourage comments and I’m more than willing to engage and explore anything brought up as a result, I’ve tweaked and edited them back to reflect my original thought process. However, this is an ongoing process, so feel free to let me know when something needs adjustment. That’s where the context boxes on top of each article will come in handy. They will explain exactly what I was thinking and or responding to and will certainly add clarity to the confusion.

While the genre categories are obvious, the meaning of the sub-categories will be made clear below. Keep in mind that while they may fit snugly where I’ve placed them, it doesn’t mean I dislike the film or hold anything against it. If anything, it means I’ll evaluate the film based on what it was trying to do with the skills and funds it had to work with.

This category refers to movies whose primary objective is to nauseate or make the audience feel uncomfortable in some way or another. While this is mostly going to be horror films (Saw), it will also include those films that simply make you squirm (In My Skin,Chuck and Buck)

This category refers to movies whose primary objective is to be as loud, flashy, and visually aggressive as possible. While this tends to sum up most action movies, it can be any film that is more concerned with dazzling your eyes than your brain.

This category refers to an old site I used to write for and co-run, based on the idea that we were self-mocking elitists. The articles within this section are mostly going to be from the series A Canadian,an American, a Lawyer, and an Elitist. The idea was that the four of us (or three, depending on who was available) would watch an agreed upon film, generally one by a famous director, but not one of his films that had been frequently analyzed, and write essays on the film. Then, without having read what the others had written, we would enter a chat room and discuss it. It is very much recommended that you watch the films first before reading the essays and chat, not only because of spoilers, but because most of what is said will make absolutely no sense to you. Also, keep in mind the time frame that these were written, from January 2004-November 2005, at least in terms of the matter of availability.

This idea was not originally mine, it was uttered on a forum I read, and it referred to the type of cheap movie (hence 3 for 5 pounds) that would be in the bargain section. These movies tend to be older, unheralded, and have little in the way of production value, which doesn’t reflect their quality, only your expectations.

This refers to an old Onion article where a girl woke up from a one night stand only to browse the guy’s DVD collection and judge him based on the utterly banal and forgettable choices he made. These kinds of movies are quite frequently romantic comedies, or thrown together thrillers, but basically, no matter what they are, watched once by the owner never to be thought about again. Everyone has a few of these in their collection, and a small percentage is nothing to be ashamed of, but for those whose entire inventory is comprised of these non-entities, you have no taste. And I’m not saying you have bad taste, I’m saying you literally have no taste in film, or taste so diffuse that you never even have an opinion.

This acronym means Seems Like Oscar Bait, which are movies that are only made to win awards, and are so high toned and off-putting that people are supposed to like them as opposed to actually liking them.

This is what cooped up guys who live in their mom’s basement and watch a lot of hentai have, while fantasizing about Asian women because they live in such a rural area that they’ve never actually met one. Hence, this category is for any and every Asian film.

This category refers to two things at the same time; First it is about those action stars or bigwigs (or people who think they are) who are having a hard time being out of the limelight and continue to make the same kinds of movies they did when they were big, but now they are older, slower, and fatter. Second, it refers to when they lived off the fat of the land, during their salad days, and so it will cover their more popular efforts as well.

This category refers to Jamie Kennedy’s hopeless documentary Heckler, where he begins by going after the garden variety heckler who drunkenly interrupts stand-up comics, and then tries to tie that in to film critics being the exact same thing as a heckler, simply because he has a bruised ego about the critical failure of Son of the Mask. Since Mr. Kennedy apparently does not believe that critics have brains of their own and just pile on, this section will be about the art of film criticism, film theory and concepts, the business of Hollywood, and detailed analysis of directors and actors.

This category is about films that couldn’t find distribution for whatever reason. These movies are distinguished from those that appear in The Shelf, as they may feature a B-level star and were the kind of low budget independent films that used to get released to smaller art theaters or in big cities at the multiplexes, but no longer do since that market has dried up.

This category will be dedicated to one of my major interests in life, mediocre boxers, with a profile of each one and a caption (they will change on a regular basis), and shorter and less professional reviews that may be only a thought or two on the film or may be five hundred words of disorganization.

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Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]

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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.